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(Henry Wallace in 1939 - before he was vice-President or Presidential candidate, had the unenviable task of Secretary of Agriculture)

Most everyone interested in Presidential campaigns past is familiar with Henry Wallace, who ran for President on the Progressive ticket in 1948. Prior to that he was a moderately familiar voice as vice-President to FDR in 1940. But in 1939 he was still Secretary of Agriculture, a post appointed by FDR in 1933. It was not a particularly popular place to be, with price controls on cotton and pork and forcing farmers to slaughter pigs and plow under cotton in order to keep prices up. Nonetheless, Wallace did the best with what was handed him and he implemented a number of New Deal programs during his tenure, including the AAA Farm Program and farm subsidies and emerged as one of the best Agriculture Secretaries the country ever had. Here is one of his rare appearances, addressing a Jefferson Day dinner on April 22, 1939.

Henry Wallace: “Problems of Agriculture are not insoluble as long as the machinery is available to farmers to enable them to cope with their problems. Advance indications are that participation in the AAA Farm Program this year will be the greatest it has ever been. Nearly six million farm families, eighty-five percent of all the farm families in the United States will cooperate in 1939 in this program of balanced farming and soil conservation. In the corn and wheat region, the striking increase in interest is evidenced by the fact from fifteen to twenty percent more farmers are taking part this year than last.”

Less than ten years later he would break with the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and forge his own bid for the Presidency. But that's another story.

Cenk Uygur highlights this excellent article from Truthdig--Michele Bachmann: Welfare Queen:

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money.

Bachmann, of Minnesota, has spent much of this year agitating against health care reform, whipping up the so-called tea-baggers with stories of death panels and rationed health care. She has called for a revolution against what she sees as Barack Obama’s attempted socialist takeover of America, saying presidential policy is “reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom.”

But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

However, Bachmann doesn’t think other Americans should benefit from such protection and assistance. She voted against every foreclosure relief bill aimed at helping average homeowners (despite the fact that her district had the highest foreclosure rate in Minnesota), saying that bailing out homeowners would be “rewarding the irresponsible while punishing those who have been playing by the rules.” That’s right, the subsidy queen wants the rest of us to be responsible.

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Here's Grassley getting asked about his welfare checks.